Nothing in the cry of cicadas

摘要

"WE WERE SHOCKED," says Brad Lister, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. "We couldn't believe the first results. I remember [in the 1970s] butterflies everywhere after rain. On the first day back [in 2012], I saw hardly any." Dr Lister is describing the Luquillo forest of Puerto Rico, where he recently carried out a census of insect life and found it had been almost wiped out in 40 years. But he could be talking about many other places. Over the past fewyears, scores of scientific studies have found declines in different measures of insect life and health, all of the order of 50-80%, in areas as far apart as Germany, California and Borneo.